Philip Larkin (5 page)

In a letter to Jim Sutton at the time, he declared, ‘I’d back coloured against white most times, and as Count Basie is top of the coloured outfits I think I’m right in saying that he is the tops.’
⁴¹
Sydney Larkin raised no objection to his son’s passion for what a German Fascist would have seen as degenerate negro music. Indeed Sydney went to the expense of a subscription to the Chicago-based magazine
Down Beat
, and also a drum kit on which his son could express his passion for ‘hot’ music: ‘I battered away contentedly, spending less time on the rudiments than in improvising an accompaniment to records.’
⁴²

On the day war was declared, 3 September 1939, full of anger and frustration at the untold death and destruction which he foresaw would befall Britain and Germany, Sydney began a new, more formal diary in a large hard-bound volume. It was to run to twenty volumes, and continued into 1946.
⁴³
His political instincts were coarse, and he shared the anti-Semitism of many of his class and generation. During the thirties he had brightened up his office in Coventry with Nazi paraphernalia brought back from conferences and Nuremberg rallies. Motion reports that John Kenyon, Professor of History at Hull University, related that Philip told him that his father ‘had a statue of Hitler on the mantelpiece [at home] which at the touch of a button leapt into a Nazi salute’.
⁴⁴
Richard Bradford elaborated Motion’s description, referring to ‘a 12-inch statue’.
⁴⁵
However, when this object came to light in 2002, it turned out, in fact, to be a tiny hand-painted figurine, barely three inches high, with brown shirt and piercing blue eyes – the kind of souvenir which many tourists to Germany in the 1930s would have brought home. There is no button; the arm simply props up on a catch.
⁴⁶
Philip later denied Noel Hughes’s claim that his father’s commitment to Nazism had extended to membership of the fascistic Anglo-German friendship organization, the Link.
⁴⁷
Indeed it seems likely that such membership would have been ruled out by his public office.
⁴⁸
As Philip records, Sydney called himself ‘a conservative anarchist’,
⁴⁹
placing himself in an English, rather than a German, intellectual tradition. His personal views did not alter his devotion to his work nor affect his service on the wartime National Savings Committee, for which he was awarded the OBE.

Rejecting his beloved father’s simplifications, and also as his mother’s son, Philip was beginning to develop the empathy and self-doubt which were to mark his mature writing. His response to the declaration of war is a subtle and complex cartoon, ‘Portrait of the Author and Family’, drawn in a letter to Sutton of 6 September 1939. His father, ‘Pop’, appears as an endearing eccentric, leaning back in his chair, his balding head seen from behind, one hand gesticulating, the other holding a newspaper with the headline ‘WAR’. In a speech balloon he defends Hitler, ‘The british govt. have started this war . . . Hitler has done all he could for peace,’ and launches into a farrago worthy of Lawrence’s
Fantasia of the Unconscious
: ‘This is the end of civilisation . . . after all, man has to be superseded, sooner or later . . . we’re only a stage in the earth’s development . . . a very unimportant stage, too.’ ‘Mop’ mildly replies: ‘Oh, do you think so? I wonder what we ought to have for lunch tomorrow . . . don’t scrape the floor like that, Philip [. . .] I hope Hitler falls on a banana skin.’ Meanwhile ‘Sister’ is preoccupied by what Joyce told her about her missed date with a storm trooper she had met on a recent trip to Munich. The poet himself, in a bow-tie, sits at the far left, pencil in hand, looking out of the picture, his face coloured with embarrassment and a huge exclamation mark above his head.
⁵⁰
The assured blend of affection and detached irony in this cartoon is astonishing in a young man of seventeen.

Philip soon developed his own attitude to the war. He wrote to Sutton in 1942, ‘the German system is, from all accounts, much more evil than last time’,
⁵¹
and recast his father’s apocalyptic despair into a disengaged quietism of his own: ‘I believe we must “win the war”. I dislike Germans and I dislike Nazis, at least what I’ve heard of them. But I don’t think it will do any good. And I have no driving power to bring it about [. . .] I can’t believe that anything I can do as an Englishman would be of the slightest use, nor do I see any “hope” in the future.’
⁵²
In one of his earliest letters to Sutton, written probably when he was seventeen, he had ventriloquized his father’s anti-Semitism: ‘As for photos in “Down Beat” . . . our worst fears. All oily Jews.’
⁵³
But three years later he wrote to his family from Oxford: ‘My bookplate has aroused dislike as it is in the shape of a Star of David. On the wave of anti-semitism that is almost bound to come after the war I may be hung up on the nearest lamp post.’
⁵⁴
His early exposure to Sydney’s controversial views had the lifelong effect of neutralizing Larkin’s political instincts. It is a key feature of his sensibility that he disclaims any coherent political ideology. There are virtually no expressions of political belief in Larkin’s letters of the later 1940s and 1950s and those which are detectable show him leaning towards the left. By the time he met Monica Jones in 1947 it seems that his left-wing views were pitted against her unreflecting conservatism.

He remained in crucial respects, however, his father’s son. Philip learnt his religious scepticism from Sydney, who told him never to believe in God. Sydney also imparted to his son his own adventurous appetite for literature. Larkin later recalled with gratitude that though ‘most boys of my class were brought up to read Galsworthy and Chesterton as the apex of modern literature, and to think Somerset Maugham “a bit hot”’, his father had filled the house with works by Hardy, Shaw, Samuel Butler, Wilde, D. H. Lawrence, Huxley and Katherine Mansfield. From an early age, also, Philip made full use of the local lending library: ‘I suppose I must have read a book a day.’ He also took early to writing, pouring out prose and verse in abundance, resting his pages on a record of Beethoven’s opus 132 quartet, the only classical disc he owned.
⁵⁵
Like his father he used for preference a 2B Royal Sovereign pencil, and his handwriting, fluent and regular, is uncannily similar to his father’s.
⁵⁶
His earliest datable writing was printed in the school magazine, the
Coventrian
, in 1933, when he was eleven. It is a prose description entitled ‘Getting Up in the Morning’, already assured in its focus, with no evidence of stumbling over phrasing or idiom. He regarded reading and writing as his own province, without reference to school: ‘I did not much like the senior English master, and I do not think he much liked me.’
⁵⁷
He neatly transcribed or typed his earliest poems and sewed them into dainty booklets.

By the time he was in his final years at school he had developed a writer’s sense of different audiences. He earned the approval of teachers by such contributions to the school magazine as his first ‘published’ poem, ‘Winter Nocturne’, which appeared in the
Coventrian
in December 1938 when he was sixteen. It is a fluent Shakespearean sonnet:

Mantled in grey, the dusk steals slowly in,

Crossing the dead, dull fields with footsteps cold [. . .]

As quiet as death. The sky is silent too,

Hard as granite and as fixed as fate.

He ends with an echo of Gray’s
Elegy
: ‘Dark night creeps in, and leaves the world alone.’ It is notable that ‘Going’, the first-written poem in his first mature volume,
The Less Deceived
, is essentially this same poem in a more accomplished form.

He was also producing less public writing for the entertainment of his friends and schoolmates. ‘Coventria’ is a scurrilous parody of the school song, making fun of the teachers:

We are the school at the top of the hill,

That Henry the King did will,

If he came back and saw it now

The sight would make him ill!

The Head’s a lout – Hardy’s a weed

With his lop-eared, pop-eyed gaze [. . .]
⁵⁸

‘Phippy’s Schooldays’ is a spoof biography of the English teacher, in dramatic prose, its farcical mayhem owing something to the Billy Bunter stories:

Bates hurled himself across the study, and crashed Philipson to the floor. The Hon. Percy was not far behind. There was a rending sound as a cheap waistcoat and jacket split up the back, and a squeal of anguish.

‘OOOHH . . . Bates, I shall report you to the Head Prefect . . . Oh! . . . ow . . . my jacket . . . my waistcoat . . .’

The remains of the punch were swamped over Phippy’s meagre features, and his steel-rimmed spectacles were cracked into a thousand pieces. A pair of poor-fund boots were dragged off and thrown into the fire.
⁵⁹

There were also comical accounts of ‘the combat between Gunner and myself and the sponges’ (conformist pupils), and a ‘Tour of K.H.S.’, in which the Headmaster A. A. C. Burton shows a visitor around, enthusiastically thrashing the wretches under his charge as he goes.
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Very different are three poems concerned with Philip’s schoolfriend Earnest Stanley Sanders, which show the influence of Auden:
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Disparaging my taste in ties

Relaxèd warmly on my lap,

I gazed into his lovely eyes

And saw the snow beyond the gap [. . .]

For life is not a storm of love,

Nor a tragedy of sex;

It only is a question of

Deriving joy from shapely necks.

         
      (‘À un ami qui aime’)

The confident form and tone of these poems is as remarkable as their lack of inhibition, at a time when homosexuality was a taboo topic: ‘I, fascinated, watch your tongue / Curl pink beyond your little ivory teeth’ (‘Stanley et la Glace’). It seems certain however that Larkin was not yet sexually active.

It was decided that, like John Kemp, the protagonist of his later novel,
Jill
, he should take the Oxford scholarship examination a year early, since in five years’ time Oxford and Cambridge might well ‘be nothing but ruins’.
⁶²
King Henry VIII School had two ‘closed scholarships’ at St John’s College, so it was there that he went for the examinations in March 1940. He was awarded a scholarship in English, while Noel Hughes gained the other place to study Modern Languages. A few months earlier the seventeen-year-old Larkin had reviewed his writings up to that point, burning much and preserving an anthology of the best: fragments of novels, poems, satirical playlets and essays. With the instinct for balance and symmetry which shows itself throughout his life, he took care to devote exactly equal numbers of pages to prose and to poetry.
⁶³
He had ambitions to be a novelist, but poetry always came more easily to him than prose, and it was in poetry that he made his first real start. Before going up to Oxford he sent five poems to the
Listener
, one of which, ‘Ultimatum’, was accepted for publication, and appeared in the issue of 28 November 1940. It is an Audenesque sonnet with self-consciously obscure imagery: ‘For on our island is no railway station, / There are no tickets for the Vale of Peace, / No docks where trading ships and seagulls pass.’